Portable electronic devices allow users to create, view, edit, receive and transmit data files from wherever the user is located. Received or created data files include any type of data file, including but not limited to emails, web pages, word processing documents, spreadsheets and image files. Data files are rendered on a portable electronic device display so that a user may view them. Some data files, however, are created for visualization on a large display (e.g., a computer monitor) and are referred to herein as large format data files. Large format data files include web pages, images and spreadsheets. Web pages include, but are not limited to, files encoded using hypertext markup language (“html”) or extensible markup language (“xml”). Web pages include tags that instruct a web browser how to render and locate on the viewed page text and images associated with the page. Very often, web page tags include instructions that are optimized for viewing the web page on a large-screen display, such as a typical computer monitor.
For example, in FIG. 1A, a displayed web page 110 on a display 100 includes tags instructing that image A be displayed at the top left of the web page 110 and that image B be displayed at the top right of the web page 110. Image A and image B have predetermined dimensions including horizontal dimensions xA and xB, respectively. Thus, if the display width xD is greater than the sum of the web page horizontal dimensions xA and xB, the images A, B will be displayed as intended by the tags. However, if the display width xD is less than the sum of the web page horizontal dimensions xA and xB, as shown in FIG. 1B, then the images will not be properly displayed and can overlap each other, for example. For at least this reason, web pages may require further processing when being rendered on a narrow display such as that used on a portable electronic device. Similarly, image files and spreadsheets may include images or fields that are wider than the display width of a portable electronic device display. In general, large format data files include fields or image regions that are designed to be viewed in their entirety and thus are ideally viewed on a display sufficiently large to visualize the entire field or image regions.
Generally, a portable electronic device display is not sufficiently large enough to visualize an entire large format data file in the same way that the large format data file is rendered on a large monitor. Accordingly, large format data files undergo additional processing steps in order to render the files onto a portable electronic device display. For example, a large format data file may be viewed in its entirety on a narrow display if the dimensions of the fields or image regions are correspondingly reduced. Often, however, dimensional reduction results in an unreadable image that must be selected and enlarged by a user in order to decipher the displayed data. Alternatively, a large format data file is subdivided into user-selected frames for sequential viewing on a narrow display. The viewed frames, however, often detract from the entirety of the image or field to be viewed.
Accordingly, an improved portable electronic device and method for displaying large format data files on a reduced-size display is desirable.